


The Water is Wide

by spinnd



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Canon, Angsty Schmoop, Coming of Age, First Time, Kingsman style, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-23 14:50:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3772315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinnd/pseuds/spinnd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quoting wholesale from source, because it is the best explanation, really. </p>
<p> <i>I also have an headcanon where merlin was found in a dumpster by the former merlin while she was heading home from work one day. and she was like “fucking stop crying” and before she knew it had picked up a baby. </i> </p>
<p><i>Basically merlin was raised by the kingsman and they all just called him junior.</i><br/> </p>
<p> <br/>Here's to Kingsman spy family fics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hatchling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alexwhitewell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexwhitewell/gifts).



> Mashup of two prompts/ideas/canon casts, [here on Tumblr](http://blinkstep.com/post/116319804075/i-ship-merlin-with-everyone-but-i-need-the-other) and [on Dressing Room 3](http://dressing-room3.livejournal.com/405.html?thread=642197#t642197). Big shout-out to blinkingkills for the excellent headcanon.
> 
> If anyone wants to know, I'm partial to [2046](http://changchens.tumblr.com/post/44331775412/gong-li-in-2046-2004-dir-wong-kar-wai) as my reference for Merlin and overall 1960s East Asian aesthetic. Except now with Scottish accents. 
> 
> The brain is a wondrous place.
> 
> And I still can't figure out if this is crack or not.

* * *

 

Half-past nine and it is ungodly late by her standards. The music rattles the sprung floor, her first gin and tonic is untouched on the table, and the mill of bodies swaying in the dance hall is altogether reminiscent of a flamingo mating season.

She isn't usually put on local assignments, not with the ongoing kerfuffles and Arthur's worsening drink habit over the recent Missile Crisis, but this prototype transmitter had needed field testing and she despaired of her current batch of tech boys, new college types and detente-green, who'd more likely drop the device into their drink than slip it onto the target. 

Also, they don't have her advantage of looks, which draws stares and glares in equal measure. Which thus allows her not ten minutes later to sidle up to their Harrovian defector when he arrives at the bar. Eyes kohled and lips Hot Coral, she makes her bait-cast in an accent not hers.

It garners the target's attention, foreign consonants like honey to poor dumb flies.

"Japanese?" The broad-shouldered man asks, eyes overbright as he leans in. She only laughs coyly in return, hand to his chest to push him back when he tries to steal a kiss, and drops the bug into his coat pocket.

In the car out back, when she finally escapes on a tried-and-tested loo break, she calibrates the tracker and Gawain watches as the first pings come through.

"Hello, sweetheart." He grins at the dotted signal. "I'll take it from here, Merl. Your car's two blocks down. Get yourself back at Camelot."

Two blocks down it is, and the Morris comes into view, just as Frank had said. She breathes out audibly; feels the relief soaking down to her aching heels. She's looking forward to a quiet rest-of-the-night.

Only, there's nothing quiet about the pitching wail that sounds from somewhere in the back of the alley.

Merlin's no mother, but any fool can recognise a baby's cry. And anyone who decides to leave an child alone and vulnerable is less a fool, and more something quite reprehensibly else. English winters are milder, unlike the screaming gales of Scottish blizzards, but it is still cold enough at this hour for her breath to mist.

And to think she had been looking forward to a _quiet_ night.

"Fuck."

She raises her eyes heavenward, and sighs again. Looks down at the bundle of ragged cloth in her arms where the babe's head barely peeks out.

"I suppose you'll have to come with me, then."

The child merely hiccups and stares at her.

She wonders if Agravain might be interested in adopting a third.

 

* * *

 

"Come the fuck again?" She asks, when Percival runs through the list of baby supplies on the second day into this parental fiasco.

The bairn gives a displeased cry from the makeshift cot of an old suitcase lined with even older uniforms; it's shabby-looking, sure, but at least the flannel and leather keeps him warm, and what with Percival's suggestion of assembling a cot - _does she look like a fucking carpenter?_

The newly minted father purses his lips; looks at her askance, then shakes his head.

"You sure you're up to this?"

Whatever _that_ implication is, it's enough to have her bristling, and her temper is hardly cooled by his snort of laughter when he meets her blazing gaze.

"Fine, have it your way," he concedes. "But at the very least have someone else to help you for the first few months. For the boy's sake, if nothing else."

As it turns out, she couldn't have stopped the flood of offers if she tried.

 

* * *

 

His first word, like any other child's, is: "Mama."

Merlin frowns at the little one who returns to gumming at the soggy biscuit in her lap, then fixes the agents gathered round the table with a withering stare.

"Right. Who the fuck taught him that?" 

No one says anything, of course, but she has her ways of finding out. Two weeks later, Dagonet finds himself leaving the Vatican City through a very convoluted route of sewage tunnels, and returns home suitably chagrined.

 

* * *

 

For all the time she spends holed up in Control or in the rapidly-expanding R&D lab, the boy, imprinted on her from the very start, has taken to following her around her various rooms as one imagines a hatchling would. Or a pup. The fondness she has for him, for she does, contrary to appearances, is not dissimilar to when she had spent the summers weaning collie runts on her parents' farm. 

Not ashamedly, she'll admit to handling him like one at times.

_What was it again, about children and animals?_

"They just need a little patience and love," Tristan's wife and mother of three reminds, calm over the phone in spite of the mini-skirmish obviously taking place in her kitchen. "If you think it's bad now, wait 'till you start potty training."

It proves true, and multiple accidents later, she wisely ropes Guinevere in to help with this particularly trying aspect of child-rearing. Because God help her, if she has to clean under her lab bench one more time this week, she'll put him in the car and drop him at the orphanage herself.

"You wouldn't!" Guinevere gives her her best outraged look, as she changes the boy into a fresh set of clothes. 

(No, she wouldn't. Yet.)

Guinevere's methods, whatever they are, work relatively quickly, something which their proud Head of Welfare takes particular pains to point out.  It is just one more thing in a list of things to remind her, in her assuredly unbiased opinion, that this lad's is a sharp one; quick, and clever.

"He'll be a fine Kingsman," Arthur says one day, watching as the boy arranges the alphabet blocks with calculated ease on the carpet of his office floor. 

That thought hadn't crossed her mind, until it does, this day.

She wordlessly reaches out her hand and the boy comes tottering over. His smile is all gums and baby teeth as he deposits the wooden K into her open palm.  

 

* * *

  

There are occasions when Theodore Llewelyn finds the time to drop by their HQ in Hertfordshire. And every time, it's as if Christmas had come early.

"You've grown, little brid," he says, when he finds himself with an armful of ticklish toddler. He rubs a chubby hand along his bristly chin, and the boy shrieks with laughter.

"Quiet day at the Circus?" She darts, but for all the legends and whispers, the age-old rivalry between their camps is far less frigid in this Cold War era. That said, tech secrets, by and by, are still heavily, jealously, guarded. 

"It's never a quiet day."

"Aye. So, skiving, then."

"Someone's got to come and give this young fellow some love." The Quartermaster jibes back, in the middle of pulling a horrendous gurn.

It shouldn't hurt like it does, the friendly barb. It is a mere spindle prick, but it draws blood nonetheless. 

She plucks the giggling boy from his arms, feels nothing as the laughter dies away in the room. The lad quiets in her firm hold, looking between his adult minders with something approaching anxious confusion.

"Send my sister my regards," is all she deigns to say. Theo nods once, almost a bow, taking her words correctly as a sign to leave.

"Merlin." 

"Q."

They watch the tall man leave through the back door, before she takes him back to their quarters. It is still an hour early for bedtime, but she tucks him in all the same.

"Mama," the soft voice says, just as she makes to turn away. It freezes her muscles for a moment, just so that she is still sat stiffly by the bedside when small arms wrap around her neck and little lips kiss her cheek.

She distangles from him gently, but her eyes are hard when she takes his chin and has him look at her. 

"Not _Mama_." She shakes her head; taps his cheek disapprovingly. "No."

She leaves with that, stopping only once to check that the night light has been left on. Goes off to find some quiet place once more, and ends up spending yet another night at the lab. The next morning brings with it three new camera test models and a mildly annoying headache. 


	2. Nestling

* * *

 

There is a run of weeks when she has her attention split between plans for the HQ's new sub-levels and cycling agents and equipment through the South Vietnamese embassy, and has little time for anything else. 

When she next turns around, his fifth birthday is past, and the boy had spent the day - and the last month - at Agravain's Oxfordshire home with his newborn; his firstborn, and youngest of three. 

"Are you're sure you're up to this?" Agravain repeats the tired refrain, when he and the boy step into her office. She gives in to the temptation to swat the Welshman round the head with her clipboard. "I'm perfectly serious, Merlin. This can't be good for him. The boy needs structure, stability. Friends would be nice too, not a sitting around smoking guns and a bunch of men in tweed." 

She's most certainly aware of that. But, "thank you," she says, nonetheless, because Charles has always meant well.

Then her desk phone rings, and it's Lancelot in Saigon pulling the alert on an impending North Vietnamese offensive, and any minute now the comms from Vauxhall Cross and 10 Downing will be a floodgate opened, and the past month's workload will be a dry run compared to this.  

Agravain takes one look at her, then hefts the Gladstone back in hand and steers the boy out. She just about catches a glimpse of his small, shy wave, before the door closes and an encrypted line patches her in.

"Merlin?"

"On my way, Arthur." 

It is wholly Spring by the time she next sees her boy.

 

* * *

 

She takes Charles' words to heart, however - she isn't as contrarian as they make her out to be, although there are worse reputations to be had. 

"I may need some help," she finally asks, individuals or pairs, and finds that she doesn't have to offer anything in return when they agree.

Excalibur and the research team quickly work out a routine for her boy during their regular hours, complete with Plans B through D for her absences, electrical fires, and other exigent circumstances. Lohengrin rounds up his Signals staff to take turns at teaching an adapted home school curriculum - which she would contribute to, gladly, but she had tried, once, and the boy had been _terrified_.

So it comes to be that her boy becomes everybody's (and yet nobody's). In their spare hours, then slowly incorporated into training sessions and mission debriefs, the men and women at HQ teach him the one thing they know best - how to become a Kingsman.

The Knights, for the most part, take him under their wing (those with their own children particularly develop a soft spot for him). Tristan starts the boy his first fire. Dagonet lets him strip and reassemble his Glocks, while Lancelot starts with sparring as soon as the boy's strong enough to lift the wooden training staff. Agravain supplies books from his own daughter's Preparatory - mathematics, science, humanities, and, of course, Latin to round out the academic toffy circle.  

One time, the boy had come in teary-eyed with a fractured collarbone that needed setting, Gawain behind him mumbling about "rock walls" and "harness" and "the lad's too skinny for his own good" - all hot air, given how _guilty_ he had looked.  

She still reminds her agent of it, every now and then, and it brings about a sudden pile of boiled sweets and fudge squares on the boy's bedside table, to his delight and her never ending amusement. Percival tries to ration the sweets; is completely piss poor at it.

And Galahad - well, Galahad brings his sons to HQ every now and again. Arthur, in his old age, must be getting soft to let him get away with such indiscretion.

"I don't want to hide what I do from them." He gives as his explanation, though she can think of at least five different regulations that breaks. "When they're older, they can decide for themselves if this is the life they want." 

"At least you've got an heir and a spare," Tristan quips, in his broad Yorkshire.

In truth, Merlin would have stopped the visits long ago - her words can bend Arthur's ear like no other's - if it hasn't been for the fact that Galahad's youngest, with his mop of auburn hair and sunray smile, is in all likelihood turning into her boy's best friend. 

"Harry!" Her boy comes running each time. 

Harry Hart's face lights up when he smiles. Light brown curls and a soft mouth, contrasted to her own nestling with his fine dark hair and the beginnings of strong features as the baby fat drops away.

Of the two Hart boys, she wonders at how unlikely a Kingsman candidate Harry would make, with his doe eyes and ruddy cheeks. Let his brother take up the Kingsman mantle, this one would be better suited to civilian life; something safe - accounting, perhaps, or law. 

More's the pity, she thinks, watching as the pair tumble out on to the lawn. Her boy could do with more friends. 

If she were wiser, she would stop these visits sooner than later, before they cemented any semblance of a real friendship. The pain of an quick, clean end is always more bearable, after all. 

Galahad is executed in East Berlin a year later, and the Harts stop coming. 

 

* * *

 

"You're not Galahad," the boy says, when she calls John H. Pearce to the Watchtower for his first mission brief.

Pearce- Galahad, clears his throat: "I am now".

She raps the table and her boy drops his attention back to his lines book. The young agent is more than a little nonplussed as he turns back to her.

"He doesn't know, does he?"

"He does." She opens his brand new Ops folder. "But that don't make it any easier."

 

* * *

 

Then, there is Pellinore.

Married but no children. Ambitious. Utilitarian - he'll go far, she finds herself often believing. He interacts with the boy with a marked disciplinarian slant, aloof and calculated, as if weighing the worth of the boy he'd offered to take to the orphanage in that first week; an offer she outrightly _fucking_ ignored. 

She sees a dilute fear occasionally in those large green eyes, but the boy never complains. Cries, yes, in his bed at times and wakes the next morning with a telltale puffiness to his face, but never complains. Not when Pellinore has him run the mile route twice over for being late with afternoon tea, or scrub out the barracks for an ill-pressed shirt at the Christmas Party, or knocks him down, again and again, on the training field and drags him back to his feet with a sharp word.

It reminds her of her training days with the SOE. Perhaps that is why she contents herself to stay aside, and not to intervene. Coddling is not in her nature, although she'd like to think herself capable of love, or some form of it. But the boy will grow up a Kingsman - there has never been another alternative - and every lesson, physical or academic or otherwise, will prove valuable.

Someday, she'll find the time to sit him down, and tell him that.

 

* * *

  

On his ninth birthday, when she'd managed to tear herself away after twelve hours of navigating Percival through his first run of Cairo backstreets, she finds him in the stables, pressed up next to the towering figure of a recuperating Pellinore as they stand before the puppy cage that now housed only one.

"Tristan's candidate left yesterday; father had a heart attack on the ninth hole at St Andrew's." He tells her, without turning around. Likewise, her boy's attention is fixed on the lone spaniel pup whining against the mesh. 

"He didn't want to take her with him."

The pup huffs a bark, pawing the wires. 

"You'll take care of the whelp," Pellinore's grey eyes are flint sharp behind his glasses when he looks down at the other orphan next to him.

Her boy nods seriously. "Yes, sir."

The Kingsman agent gives a rare smile, and even rarer praise.

"Good."

Lina, he decides to name his Field Spaniel, which makes him Curdie, she supposes, and she's the fucking Princess, obviously. Like her namesake, the roan pup is as cannie as they come, and thankfully not as ugly. Although at times, a little smelly.

The boy trains her with a firm hand. In that, it seems, he's taken after her as well. And it becomes a regular sight in Camelot, in the teak corridors or in the wide rambles of surrounding fields, that of her boy and his dog.

"They're quite a pair, aren't they?" Galahad (not-Hart, she has to remind herself, even three years on) remarks, his own Westie snuffling around his ankles. Some of the agents had gathered with her to watch the boy work Lina through a modified obstacle course. "You've got a good boy, Merlin." 

She does. It is a jolting thought.

She catches Pellinore alone in the hallway of the medical wing one clouded evening, and bars his way when he tries to step politely around her.

"Don't think I don't fucking know what you're doing."

"I would not have expected anything else from you," he says.

"He'll have to go through the test one day."

"He will."

"He won't shoot her."

Chester King smiles as he walks away, limp barely noticeable anymore. "We'll just have to wait and see."


	3. Fledgling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't quit with the crossovers. Someone write 007/Spooks/Kingsman so I don't have to.

* * *

 

 

He answers to a variety of names growing up. There's _boy_ and  _lad,_ most commonly; _son_  by a blonde man once in Arthur's office with a denim shirt and a Texan tan,  _brid_ as Theo calls him, _chick_ is Guinevere's. 

Little merlin, Lancelot starts, and it is for a laugh, until it isn't. Until it sticks.

 _Merlin_ , he writes on the front pages of his books, the contents slowly morphing from times tables and penmanship into theorems and vectors and autocodes.

"You ready, boy?" Says Dagonet on a Friday morning at sparring practice; new Dagonet, three days into service, and hardly a decade older than he is.

"Don't call me that," he snaps.

"All right," the Knight from Lincolnshire concedes after a confused pause. "What shall I call you, then?"

"Merlin." He says, almost without hesitation.

The older man laughs. "I can't call you Merlin."

He knows he can't. To Dagonet, to everyone else, Merlin is five-foot-five and female, with immaculate coiffs and narrow come-hither eyes; not near six feet of limbs and nose with a crewcut and knobbly knees.

Still, it doesn't stop him from surging forward without warning to tackle the man, the crash of his weight sending them both to the mat. He gets in a few swings, sloppy as they are, but Dagonet is faster, bigger, stronger, in the end. He nearly blacks out from the chokehold before his senses kick in and he surrenders, grudingly (gagging).

"That was terrible form," Agravain says as they help him to the infirmary. "Attacking a fellow agent? Most ungentlemanly."

Merlin, of course, hears about it immediately.

"What was that about?" She asks him later that day. "Fancy yourself some sort a' Southside brawler now, hmm?" 

He can hear Lina whining from where she'd been locked out on the other side of the office door.

"I'm not -" he swallows, breathes deep, fist twitching into a clench. "I'm not ' _boy_ '."

"No." She agrees. "You're not." 

"Then everyone should stop calling me that, a'right? Everyone has their code, their name, whatever fuck else they want to go by, but me? 'Boy', or 'Kid', or anything anyone feels like calling me for the day? I'm just some charity case, the stray you brought home 'coz you felt sorry for it - and they won't let me forget that, will they?"

She lets him finish his tirade. Then leans into her seat - back, not forwards, and it relaxes the line of her chin. 

"I know what it's like, feeling like you don't belong."

With the arrogance only a brimmingly adolescent fourteen-year-old can muster, he shoots back: "Got left by a fucking dumpster too, did you?"

"Don't be obtuse. And don't be rude." She has little patience for sarcasm, but the boy brings out some latent instinct that makes her want to reach out, connect; keeps her trying, in any case. "You're not the only bairn to have been picked up by someone else because your parents couldn't care for you." 

Belatedly, his gaze drifts to the small framed photograph on her desk, a holiday snapshot where an elderly Caucasian couple smiles against a sand-duned backdrop. She watches the bloom of anger slowly fade from his eyes. 

"We're not all that different, you and I."

Growing up in her little Strathclyde town, where she stood out for her hair and eyes and colour of her skin, then later at Kingsman, surrounded by posh white Church of England types, of which she yet again isn't any of the like. Her years have taught her all she ever has to know about chips on one's shoulder. She doesn't empathise with him just for the sake of it.

"You could have it better, aye, but you could always, _always,_ be worse off than you are." Her rhotic taps burr like a drill. "I've learned to be grateful. I suggest you start doing the same." 

He looks chastised enough at that, if still somewhat truculent, spoiling for a fight. He's only fourteen, she reminds herself.

"So back to the main question, then. What _should_  we call you?" 

"Merlin." He says, no hesitation this time. 

"Oh, there's a surprise." She keeps her inflections low, neutral, in spite of her own unexpected well of emotions. "And you're sure?"

He is. "I am."

"It isn't a name you pay fifty quid to have changed on a deed poll. You want it - you have to earn it. Understood?"

She won't have anything less than perfection in this, and makes it abundantly clear. He presses his lips together.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Right. And no more decking other agents. Not without good reason, anyhow." 

He feels the start of a small smile. "Yes, ma'am."

 

* * *

 

Some still address him as 'boy', out of sheer habit. Arthur, for one, with the years of marinating himself in gin and tobacco snuff, and couldn't have changed his mind even if he tried. 

"He doesn't like it," Merlin says, but without the heart to admonish the old man. 

"What's not to like?" Arthur peers over the stack of newspapers on his desk. "It's a lovely name. We had an Alsatian called Boy, back before the war."

She tries not to grimace at the comparison. 

The others had reacted better, for the most part, and Lohengrin's brilliant idea to assign him a trainee's call helps cover over most awkward circumstances.

"Isn't it a Welsh name, though?" Is Lancelot's question when they are gathered around the outfitted training terminal in Control, and an obscenely flipped V is her answer, accompanied by Gawain's booming laugh. Her boy merely smiles and clips the earpiece on.

"Do you read me, Tristan?"

"Loud and clear, Mabon. Take it slow, lad, all right? Drive me into that lake, and I swear there'll be hell to pay."

So Mabon he is, for four years in Control, learning everything he could from crypto-algorithms and ciphertexts to dry runs and ops handling. Newer technology, with their machine codes and subroutines, edge in during this time, for which she calls on the younger techs and the odd favour from Theo's newly elected apprentice.

"Quentin the Quartermaster. Really, Theo?" She says, out of earshot of the pair currently huddled over a circuit board, and Theodore merely smiles, looking inordinately proud of himself.

 

* * *

 

Galahad volunteers for the boy's first handler run. A simple security op in Brighton, on the back of a Party conference - Arthur even promises a day's R&R when he returns if they behave themselves. 

Two days of eavesdropping on bookies' bets at the pub across the main road, and even the normally unruffled Pearce is getting restless. Her boy's notepad is slowly filling with doodles of Mabinogion monsters, and Lina has taken to snoozing in the yard out of sheer boredom.

Then Merlin steps out of the room for one minute, and it all goes to hell. Of _fucking_ course.

"Someone's just bombed the Grand!" Peterson shouts over the PA, the loss of protocol going unnoticed as all the HQ staff are sent scrambling, frantically manning the lines down South East and to Parliament and MoD because God only knows who is alive in that hotel and who isn't, of the ministers in attendance, and they may well have just fucking lost _everyone_.  

She slides into her chair. Next to her, her boy is half out of his seat, yelling down his mic at Galahad who's taken off into the smoking entrance of the hotel. There is little else coming over the feed except screaming and the ominous rumbling of a building barely standing.

"Don't you fucking dare get yourself killed!" He roars, and proceeds to pull out floorplans and construction details from the operation file. 

And even as Merlin takes the call to the Home Secretary, she doesn't take her eyes off him. Watches, as her boy guides his agent through rubble and debris that he can't even see, papers flying across the desk, his hands steady, his voice sure.

He is ready, she thinks, just before the line on the other end clicks through.

-

They hear about the casualties on the news later, the damage, the PIRA statement as well as The Lady's own brand of _Up Yours_ stoicism. Five dead, and it's a tragedy but it isn't a _crisis_ and they allow themselves to feel that relief. 

Galahad returns home alive. Therein, he finds relief too.

"Well done," Arthur says, to both agent and handler during the debrief, and leaves it at that. Then two weeks later, a man comes knocking on their door with a Decoration honor, and makes John Harry Pearce an offer he cannot refuse. 

"You're leaving us for Thames House?" He asks, no - accuses; makes very clear to Pearce that he is thoroughly unhappy with the other man's decision.

His agent, thirty-three and already fast-tracked to Section Head, takes his arm in a firm grip.

"You did well, Mabon. Very well. You keep doing for the rest of the boys what you did for me, yes? You keep them safe." 

And just like that, yet another Galahad is gone.

 

* * *

 

"Who's the shell?" 

He enters the library with his hands behind his back, at ease, shoulders back and displaying the gold K insignia on the left breast of his military sweater. Confidence is practiced, after all.  

The new batch of candidates congregating around the bookshelves give him a thoroughly critical once-over; he gives them not one fidget. Lina, likewise, is calmly seated beside him with one eye on the door.

"What are you, boy? The agency mascot?" The tallest recruit turns, his raised eyebrow setting the others off, derision thick in their laughter.  

"Better a mascot than a clowning idiot, I'd say." A voice pipes up from the back of the group. 

Everyone turns to its source: Pellinore's candidate, who sits on the window ledge swinging his legs idly. 

He feels his back straighten, just fractionally. Harry Hart keeps watching him, a smug smile forming. 

"And he'll be your assistant instructor on top 'a that." The commanding brogue snaps them all to attention, and they fall into line as the tiny lady sweeps in. Some of them are openly gaping at her Oriental features, but after a dozen batches of similarly asinine boys, she's more than bored with it by now. 

Her gaze alights on the eight trainees, flitting over the last, familiar, face with barely a pause, as she opens their first day of training. He takes his place beside her, and his smirk an unnerving facsimile of hers.  

"Gentlemen. Welcome to Kingsman." 

- 

She recognises him, of course she does - it's hard to mistake those eyes and mouth and the untamable head of fluff as belonging to anyone but the young Master Hart.

The hell's he think he's doing here, she wonders (not silently), as she puts them through their paces in the first week, and closely observes Jerome Hart's son through them all - the drills, the marches, the morning physicals with their blare of sirens and sudden, inexplicable loss of recruits' footwear. 

The first Friday night when an explosion rocks the barracks, and he's the last one out, dragging an unconscious Brenton with him and narrowly missing the beam that comes down behind them.

She has a word with her boy about employing restraint when setting off the simulations and pyrotechnics - can't say she finds him all too apologetic by the end of it. She catches him trading glances with Hart the next day, the older boy still covered in dust and soot, and wonders (silently) if that incendiary display last night is not the worst signal of attraction she's ever seen. 

"An explosive end to your week, gentlemen?" Trust her boy to think up of that one. 

"Only as volatile as whoever had set it off." Trust Harry Hart to be impressed by it.

She shuts them up with a snap of her clipboard and sends the mostly disoriented lot off on a dawn run in their pajamas. Harry Hart turns before leaving, trailing tail end of his group, and throws back a winking smirk that her boy almost nearly returns. Notices her glare, and his smirk merely widens.

Save her from this preening display, she's far too fucking old for this shite.

 

* * *

 

Their first tryst, as if they were still in grammar school, takes place behind the garden shed at the far end of the field. 

"What would your Ma say if she catches us?" Harry asks, even as his hands busy themselves with their belts.

He feels his face heat up. "She's not my Ma. Not my real one anyway."

"Really?" Curve of lips, pouting and pink. "Could've fooled me."

He sighs, and Harry Hart _fucking_ giggles. "Were you this annoying when we were younger?"

"I'm never annoying." Harry says smugly, then drops to his knees. "Unless you want me to be." 

"Ass."

"Only if you've got lube."

He is startled by his own laugh. "Shut up and suck me already."

"Ask nicely." Despite the scolding tone, Harry's more interested in attending to the bulge in his pants. "You are rubbish at this gentleman thing, aren't you? Growing up here has done nothing for your manners." 

"Aye, I must be such a disappointment." 

He hears an appreciative hum rumble through Harry's throat when he finally frees him from the confines of his Y-front briefs.

"Well now, I wouldn't call that a disappointment."

A hand comes over his face as he stifles another laugh. Harry chuckles along, obviously enjoying his discomfiture. Then a warm wet tongue along his shaft sends enough of a jolt of pleasure through him that he forgets any inhibition.

"Fuck, Harry, where did you - _fuck_."

His hands scrabble of their own accord in the tousled head of hair. Harry sucks him down so deep he feels his eyes roll back, then pulls up and off.

"We started classes last Monday. Didn't you know?"  

Of course he knew, he wants to say, but the wet warmth returns again around his cock and he hears himself answer with a whine instead. 

"You should've seen the boys' faces when Percival walked in. They looked like they were either about to piss themselves laughing or die from embarrasment." With one hand at his base moving slowly, pumping, Harry continues, now that his mouth is free. "It's all theory at this point; anatomy, physiology, neurochemistry, the molecular structure of GHB... Lucky for you, I've been doing the advanced readings."

The little licks to the tip make him want to kick the bastard in the teeth, the show-off.

"And are you - _ahh -_ are you trying for extra credits by making out with your instructor?"

"Assistant instructor." The sibilants scrape teeth on skin and he feels a scream form behind his bitten-down lips. "No, this is purely recreational. One I've taken a particular inclination to."

"So just a h-hobby, am I?" He pants, feeling the gnawing heat sink into his balls, a small part of him recoiling at the thought of Harry Hart, twenty-one and just out of Cambridge, winging his way through his Bachelor of Law bedding and being bedded. The three added years of experience and sexual confidence he had on him must show - after all, he's had little to experiment with, stuck here in Camelot. 

(Pellinore had suggested him starting other classes when he approached his eighteenth birthday, and he's never seen Merlin that furious that quickly.) 

Cold air hits him when the plump mouth pulls off his rigid length.

"I can hear you thinking. Stop thinking."

"Uh." And stop forming coherent sentences too, apparently. 

Harry gets to his feet, and kisses him softly. He frowns at the sensation of lips on lips - a first - and the strange taste of himself, his fluids - that's a first too. 

The other's hand seeks his own out, drawing them both down, where Harry leaves off just for a moment to unbutton himself; then it's two hands on two cocks, and it's a slick slide and a tight warmth, and it leaves him shaking.

He comes, as yet another first, in someone else's hand.

"Well..." he trails off with a smile as Harry arches shortly and spills himself over their fists. "I certainly approve of this hobby of yours. Shame you might be leaving us soon."

Harry looks at him, lids heavy, gaze sated. 

"Who said I was going anywhere?"

 

* * *

 

True to his word, he wakes on the morning of his nineteenth birthday to the news that Harry had made it through the final round; and that Mr Pickles was none the worse for wear.

The bed dips as Lina jumps up next to him, a settling warmth by his side. His fingers find the soft fur of the spaniel's head, and he pets her absently, rifling through his memory rolodex of Berlin, Brighton, and old names to new faces. 

Another day, he thinks.

Another day, another knight.


	4. Flight

 

* * *

 

 

His training coincides with commencement of recruitment for a new Lancelot, after Bill Langley returns from Afghanistan with shrapnel twisted through his left leg, and the only way to save him was to not save his leg at all. 

He catches himself checking the lounge for a glimpse of Bill, every now and then. Bill, who's now retired up in South Shields and collects the postcards mailed over from the rest of the old boys and is no longer around to disrupt his Advanced Mechanics classes with a well-aimed shuriken.

He catches Percival glancing out the room occasionally, from where he scribbles their lessons at the blackboard, and knows he's not the only one who misses the stars.

The training is everything he's been through, since as far back as he can recall - only now planned on a strict timetable and graded on a mountain of checklists. Field testing takes place with his fellow recruits, who are politely curious, but at least distantly nice. He wouldn't put it past Harry- Galahad to have had a hand in that.

"It's just a formality for you," Nimue assures, and he can hear the merriment in the young woman's voice just before the gimbal tilts and he nearly goes over the side of the building. 

("Bloody hell, Nim." He tells her later. She makes her apology in the broom closet with her hand down his siren suit, cleans her fingers before patting his cheek fondly.) 

"Was it better than wanking off to skin mags?" Harry asks later when he finds him in the change room.

"I don't kiss and tell, Hart," he says, and the reply only makes Harry try harder to disabuse him of that reservation.

Backed into the lockers with Harry's hands parting his thighs, he barely notices Gawain walk in - and walk straight back out again.

 

* * *

 

The plane jump is new, even to him, and Nimue's mild panic when not one, but two of their parachutes don't open is a bracing jolt to his system. He's not felt fear like that since... Brighton, perhaps. 

Five of them pass the jump test, and Crommers catches him later with a _hello_ and a _thank you_ that's as genuine as they come.

"Hope to see you on the other side," the young ex-Sandhurst adds.

Arthur has a heart attack the following day. Pellinore is voted in.

"Two chances," the new Arthur tells the others. "Make them count."

Then to him: "You report to me." 

His training is no longer a formality. He tries not to miss Nim too much.

 

* * *

 

Lina sickens in this year of training too - 1985, and she's almost a septuagenarian and he's not quite twenty.

It is a small mercy that she wakes him with her crying, panting in her crib like she'd gone the mile run with him (when she hadn't - she couldn't); he keeps his quarters because they had allowed him that one consolation, to have him close to Control, and none of the other boys had found enough reason to complain.

He folds himself down by her bedding and pets her faded fur. She bumps his hand with her nose.

"I know," he tells her, even as her head drops and her chest struggles with heaves. "I know."

The night passes in increasingly laboured breaths, and at daybreak, his decision is made for him. A small mercy. 

He retrieves the handgun from his trunk, and a spare towel from the ensuite. Wraps the old spaniel well against the chill of the morning mist before taking her out behind the stables. 

"Good girl," he tells her, one last time, and attaches the silencer. He doesn't want to startle the horses. 

Merlin is waiting for him when he returns; looks down from where she is at the top of the steps leading to the back kitchen.

"Arthur wasn't going to see you until next week." Her tone is knowing and casual. 

"I know." And it's the truth. "But she was my dog. If I shoot her, it'd be on my terms."

That's all he'll allow himself to say on that matter.

 

-

 

Merlin watches him leave to the change rooms; morning roll call starts in fifteen. She allows herself to feel a pang of pride, that only grows when she reports back to Arthur with her boy's message, word for exact word.  

"Maybe he's too good for Kingsman," Arthur says, with the exact smile of that '74 summer. 

She might be inclined to agree.  

 

* * *

 

She isn't a field agent, not officially within this organisation. So they don't expect their Merlin to die in the field, not by a long shot, and yet, old age wouldn't go down well with her - she wouldn't let it, of that he's sure.

Maybe she'll just live forever, Tristan used to say, and his younger self hadn't laughed along with the others because one never knew, with these things.

He's grown out of the notion now.

Doesn't stop the doctor's diagnosis from feeling like a slap to the face, still. 

"If I hear him call my skin yellow one more time..." she growls when they leave the consult room, and he can't, could never, tell if she's merely joking.

The cancer grows from head of pancreas to anything around the vicinity, then more, but it is slow enough for her to hand over her duties in a steady drip feed. Where they sit at the terminal puts them almost at a height when she oversees his work, and she still reports regularly to Arthur on his progress. 

"He's ready," she tells Arthur, once when he's in the room with them. In reponse, Arthur doubles his log hours and is personally on hand to observe him run a three-man op for a thirty-six hour shift.

"Hmmm." Is all his Chief deigns him, before sending him back to his room. He barely makes it to the bed before collapsing. 

He wakes hours later, thirsty and mildly disoriented, to the sight of a small hunched figure perched beside him in her wheelchair.

"We're a special sort, my boy." That familiar voice says.

Mabon has been his field call for years, his proxy name that most everyone has accepted, but he knows she still finds it difficult to equate him as anything other than her  _boy_ \- even now, when he can hit his targets a hundred yards out and decrypt entire department codebooks and no longer shares her quarters with his too-small bed; has not, in a very long time.

She's not been in her quarters either, since the start of this year. Too small for the medical equipment, and the oxygen tanks are a fire hazard they're not willing to risk so close to the Ballistics lab.

"We're survivors." She tells him, smoothing a hand over his brow. Her palm is warm and dry, just like how he remembers.

We're survivors, he hears her say, when within the week she takes a dramatic turn for the worse, and he spends his last training month shuttling between Camelot and the Royal Free.

It is the first of April when he brings her news of his commission.

"April Fools," he jokes gently, and sees her smile behind her mask.

She is gone the next day.

 

* * *

 

It is devastatingly sunny the day they bury her.

Harry watches him closely.

"I'm sorry about your -" He flounders for the words, the one and only time he does.

"Ma." He finishes for him, ignoring the look it gets him. "My ma."

It feels right to call her that. Once it would have, should have, been Merlin, but no, she's not that, not anymore.

Arthur approaches him, mouth a pressed line beneath the shielding brim of his hat.

"Merlin," he acknowledges, and a heavy hand claps his shoulder. It is the first time Chester King's called him that.

Because he's Merlin now. He is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot's gone and run into 5. One more to go.


	5. Epilogue

 

* * *

 

 He has little time in the following month for anything outside Control. One after another they are called upon - for Berlin, Tripoli, Beirut, Pripyat - and the incidents and accidents and not-accidents leave him barely time to breathe, much less think (about anything else but). In all truthfulness, there is a comfort in the always familiar routine of keeping an eye on agents and and an ear on bugged lines. It's what he knows. It's what he's good at. And so it makes perfect sense to keep at it, upgrading his own skills set on-the-job, whilst putting their computer systems through an upgrade of their own which he himself personally supervises.

He goes on like this for three weeks straight until Harry returns from Tehran and near bodily drags him from away his station, to Guinevere's silent, watchful approval.

"You're not a robot, so stop acting like one," Harry comments offhandedly, then hauls him through the door of the nearest pub and proceeds to get them both effectively and thoroughly pissed.

"I feel slightly sick," he hears himself distantly say when the clock strikes midnight and they slide into the waiting unmarked cab with loose limbs and looser tongues.

"If you'd be so kind as to use the paper bags provided, then, sir."

He barely manages to identify the voice in his spirited haze. Cavall, from Auxillary, readjusts the rearview mirror and pulls out of the parking lot.

Harry's end-of-mews pad over in Kensington is well-stocked and extravagantly, if questionably, furnished; one of several London properties previously owned by the Hart family and impressively managed by Jerome Hart's widow, which Harry had bought over the title deed to (at his own insistence, in his own name only) once he'd received Arthur's handshake. His mother's retirement to Chichester, and his brother's work in Johannesburg, had meant that Harry had free reign for its renovation work and interior decor; which possibly explained why it had looked like a time warp of artistic period styles ever since he'd first set foot in it back in late '85. 

Mr Pickles barks excitedly as they fall through the front door and nearly collide with the Delftware umbrella stand. 

"Oh," Harry grinds out from where their lips are still pressed bruisingly togther, "shut it."

The rug scuffs under their boots, a picture frame topples from the wall hook at their backs, and they nearly trip over the Yorkie twice as he dances around their feet. He catches his heel on the lowest stair, and the bannister creaks under the heavy impact of his weight against it.

"Stop -" Harry pants against him, "-tearing down my house."

"Can't look any worse than it is -!" His breath catches as sharp teeth set a grazing line along his neck, a direct drag of want spooling down to his crotch. 

They make it, somehow, up the stairs without serious bodiliy injury, and tumble straight into the bedroom. The lights come on somewhere in between their kissing and their frantic undressing, and with all the hands and lips and tongues discovering and being discovered, neither of them can be arsed about the curtains right now. 

_(Put on a show, why don't we?)_

He winds up on his back on the plush bedcovers, fingers bruising Harry's shoulder, the night air sticky on his skin, and his blood alcohol level is surging with a strange impetuous high that leaves him brave, or reckless, or both. 

"Fuck me." He demands. 

Harry looks down at him, pupils pitch dark and hungry. "That's the drink talking." 

"You're supposed to be good at this, aren't you?" He ignores the diversion. "So prove it. Fuck me."

"Merlin, if it's your first time -" There is a tilt of that auburn head that is more sober than it has any right to be; it looks ridiculous, accompanied as it is by those flushed cheeks and kissed-wet lips and billowed plume of hair.

He rises onto his elbows, and levels his best glare. "You or me, Hart. Which is it?"

He knows, that Harry knows, what he's trying to do. There must be better, more mature ways of handling whatever it is bottled up inside him and is now dangerously close to spilling over, but right now, he can't think of any. 

Harry obeys, but not like how he wants it (how he thinks he wants it). It is slow, careful, measured; time and preparation, of which he craves neither presently. Warmth too soft and touches too light to keep him grounded - he needs _more_.

"Get on with it!" He hisses as the thick length presses into him, inch by ridged inch, and he consciously tenses.

Harry bares his teeth, and it's almost a grin, as he slams in. 

This is supposed to be good, he reminds himself. But it feels too odd, too intense - moans amplified, downlights blindingly bright, skin too hot and too tight, and the ache in his groin feels like a stranglehold. He bucks up, and the strain of muscle nearly doubles him over, leaving him with the shakes. He can feel blood and heat surfacing along patches of skin, on his tongue, behind his eyes.

And in his arse. The burn rubs like a blister, but it is the scraping weight inside him as Harry moves that wracks him all the way through. One hard thrust knocks a spasm through him that locks his throat against the reflux of his stomach contents, and he clings to the other man, eyes closed against the faint nausea.

Harry notices, he's sure he does. Thankfully, he doesn't stop; instead, speeds up the snap of his hips and races for home, speeding up to the climax which comes with a sharp shout, then without missing a beat, wraps a hand on his rigid cock and works that clever fist in time with the remaining thrusts. 

Still speared on fullness and heat, and the hands on him are stripping him raw. He feels himself arching up, opening up, exposed as his head tips back and his gaze is pinned to a single spot on the ceiling. He can hear pulse and breath through his ears, feel the sweat prickle and bloom on his skin, and the bulb overhead extends a halo, searing yellow on his retinas.

Maybe this is what dying feels like.

He finds that he is all right with that. 

"Fuck," he breathes, and comes.

  

-

 

He is still on his back when he comes to, with light in his eyes and the feel of his heart beating between his shoulder blades into the mattress beneath. There is an odd debility to his limbs, muscles drowsy in the aftermath, and his head is almost too heavy for the pillow. 

He's never come quite like this before.

Harry is awake, propped to his side and watching from behind a fringe of sweat-soaked lashes as he tries to regain coherence, a solid presence beside him. When he turns to fully face him, however, there is something quite inexplicably torrid in those sweet brown eyes. 

"Do you know - I reckon her voice was probably the last thing my father heard before he died. " The older boy says quietly, by his ear. 

The ache makes itself known behind his sternum and a tightening lump winds itself up behind his tongue.

"I - " his throat closes again and he chokes a little, but his eyes stay hot and bare. "I'm-"

"Then again, it was probably the first voice _you_ heard, come to think of it. Funny, that."

He doesn't quite know how to answer that, so he doesn't. Merely turns away and allows the silence to stretch between them, light and air expanding in time to their breathing. His palms are damp on the (expensive) cotton sheets.

"Did I hurt you?" Harry asks, after awhile. 

No, he thinks.

"A little," he concedes, offering the truth because that's the least Harry deserves.

"Mmm." The pale body shifts minutely beside him. "It'll be better next time. Hopefully."

The thought makes him breathe that bit easier. "Is that a promise?"

"Things to work on, things to improve. Your sex voice, for one. Can't believe they let you pass the Trap with that. You sounded like a dying goat."

The laugh bubbling out of him is amused, not at all hysterical like he'd have thought. It follows on a smile, that hurts only because it stretches his bitten lip.

The hand he seeks out is warm and dry, and he ponders, casually, how when he had said f _uck me,_ Harry had known that he meant something else entirely.

 

* * *

 

'91 is not a good year - not a bad one, either, by certain standards. But global events come and go, a tidal rise and fall that is unstoppable as it is predictable, and in the Kingsman life, one becomes used to its mercurial nature. It'll take more than a Coalition war in the Gulf to surprise them anymore.

It's the little mundane things of life, however. 

"Right," he says, eyeing his new look in the mirror. "That's that, then."

He expects a more overt reaction when he enters Harry's office several hours later, but Hart merely raises an eyebrow over his morning papers. 

"Bit early for your midlife crisis."

His hand runs over the smooth skin of his newly shorn scalp.

"I need glasses, and I'm balding. I think those qualify me sufficiently."

"You're not even thirty." Says Harry, who is, almost.

He knows. He blames Saddam, foremostly, and a possible history of robust Mediterranean genes which, he suspects, must be also responsible for his nose and the deceptively tanned complexion despite going days on end without seeing the sun as Desert Storm continues to crash down around them.

"Any word on Charles?"

"No, uh," He shuffles through the papers in hand. "Correspondence from Jeddah and Baghdad have nothing. Lancelot's holing up in Damascus for the moment - says he'll let us know if he gets wind of anything."

"I'm certain he will," Harry lowers the broadsheet. "Is that a clipboard?"

He lets the papers flip back into place. "It's - it was hers."

Harry nods slowly. "It's a good look on you."

"Well, yes. Better than heels and a skirt."

"Oh..." Harry disappears once more behind the editorials. "I wouldn't be so sure of that."

 

* * *

 

They celebrate the tenth year of Arthur's reign with a 'low key party' in the Main Hall that involved endless refills of pork scratchings and no small amounts of punch. Mix alcohol and Kingsmen together, however, and nothing stays low.

"Who put the old todger in charge of the music?" The young man next to him leans over to holler, nearly dipping his tie into his drink. James - James is his name, his third Lancelot, replacing Saunders (God rest his soul), and unerringly cut from the same cloth as the earlier two. Boisterous, loud, an easy smile and an even easier lay, and despite being as blue-blood as one could get without actual Windsor association, had succeeded in charming everyone from Arthur to the chamber maid from the outset.

"You were a day too late," Gawain shouts back over the blare of swing trumpets. "If you had passed selection back in January without having had to re-sit your Arms and Ballistics paper, we wouldn't be here now, would we?" 

Gawain, ex-Winchester, like Arthur is and Pellinore was, is seated next to Crommers, their current Pellinore, who seems unfazed by the choice of music and is busy rearranging the crackling pieces on his napkin into smiley faces

"Youngsters, you have no appreciation for music nowadays." Dagonet chimes in, puffing up all of his forty-one years and shooting a grin at said 'young ones' who are all past their thirtieth birthday, mind: him, and Crommers, and Tristan, who is now older than him by only a year. James, a mere twenty-two, is the runt of their litter. 

"He's much younger than you, Dags. Just got an old soul, our Percy," And James is off again, flashing his usual brilliant smile as the rest of them chorus a "here, here!"

( _Their_ Percival: English, like his predecessor, only more stoic and serious, thanks to his SBS background. For all his jibes, James had taken an instant shine to him, and up at Control they had found that the two worked surprisingly well together.) 

"Picture!" Nimue ambushes them and snaps a series of flashes off that leave him with an uncomfortably starry vision. "Lovely, boys. We'll keep this for Charles when he gets back."

"To Charles!" James cries, and raises his toast - James, who has never even met his Charles, his old Agravain, out on long term assignment to Kuwait after a splendid run during Desert Storm. 

(He still visits the rest of the Mandeville family in Oxfordshire occasionally, when he has the time.)

He can't help the smile that issues forth when the disc ends its run, and James is up and running into a sliding tackle to stop Percival from loading another Big Band tracklist.

"Having fun with our boys?" The voice husks low beside his ear, and he nearly jumps from his seat.

"Harry!" He gazes up, feeling the rum heat his cheeks. "Thought you said you were coming in tomorrow."  

Harry Hart looms behind his chair, suit creased from the time it had spent in his suitcase. "Early flight out. Would've called, but I didn't want to ruin the surprise."

"You would figure that." He feels his smile broaden as he stands, and they're at eye-level now. "Ass."

"Only if you've got lube, darling." 

"As a matter of fact -" He keeps his grin wide and wicked, even as Harry's eyes narrow amusedly. He gets his arse pinched for that.

"Oi, no fucking on the table, you hear?" Gawain yells at them behind his laugh. "I'm not wanting your spunk in my bar snacks. That's right unsanitary."

Harry bows low. "Gentlemen, if you will excuse us."

They march off together at the end of the night, and if Harry had also caught sight of Arthur watching them from his table, he pretends to ignore it too.

 

-

 

Like Harry had promised, it had gotten better after the first time. He'd grown accustomed to the burn and fill, grown to crave it, chase it, the dance on the edge of release just as tantalising as the final freefall that Harry had always been so adept at wringing from him with his hands or his mouth. 

Or, in tonight's case, neither.

He clings to the bedspread, face pressed deep into the pillow and his vision slowly clearing from black as his cock gives a last feeble spurt beneath him, the muscles in his stomach and arse slowly unclenching.

"Oh," is about as much as he can presently muster. Harry, spent within him but still so very hard and hot, strokes a hand down the soft skin of the back of his head.

"Good?"

"Very."  

"Excellent. I'll make a note of that for next time."

"You could write a book with your notes." He mutters into the pillow, feeling the drag of his eyelids flutter when Harry pulls out.

Pulls out but not away - there is still a mouth worrying at the back of his neck, accompanied by wandering fingers down his bare flank. Unusual. They're normally deep into some somnolent haze after a right good fuck like this one. 

Stubble grazes the sensitive skin of his nape, and he twitches uncomfortably. Lets his annoyance bleed through his words as he turns to face him.

"What are you doing? Go to sleep." 

"I can't." Harry's grin says it all. "Sing to me."

"You're insufferable."

"Oh come, it's not hard. Like this -" Harry turns onto his back, one hand under his head, the other lazily tracing an imaginary metronome. " _Lullay, mine liking, my dear son, mine sweeting -_ "

"-Lord save us." He tries to bury his head under the pillow, but Harry yanks it away. "What are you on about?"

"Surely you know at least one?" 

In the aftermath of trying to retrieve the featherdown pillow, wherein Harry gets an elbow in the stomach and he is nearly toppled out of the bed, they finally find themselves sprawled heavily, sweating backs sticking to the sheets, with the duvet thrown off and tangled just above their hips. He can't quite see Harry at this angle, but he bets they're wearing matching grins.

His gaze finds the Mews home ceiling again, with its new running cracks and antique metal fixtures; so different from the panelled roofing he'd known all his childhood, falling asleep to the hum of its ducting, under the small red eye of the smoke detector.

"Surely you know a lullaby?" Harry presses again. 

And he... does. There is a long-forgotten strain somewhere in his memories, a dim room and a low soft voice, and he loses the tune and the words most-ways but hums nonetheless:

_The water is wide, and I can't cross o'er_

_And neither have I the wings to fly._

_Build me a boat that can carry two,_

_And both shall row, my love and I._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again, everyone, for checking this out and hope you've enjoyed it! And once again, very special thanks to alexwhitewell for the headcanon (prompt) that gave this life. :D


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